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Good Men, Good Women (1995)

Review #1,283

THE SCOOPDirector: Hou Hsiao-HsienCast: Annie Shizuka Inoh, Lim Giong, Jack KaoPlot: A film within a film, as well as an intertwining of both past and present, as linked by a young woman, Liang Ching. She is being persecuted by an anonymous man who calls her repeatedly but does not speak. Liang is also rehearsing for a new film that is due to go into production soon. It is about a couple Chiang Bi-Yu and Chung Hao-Tung who returns to China to participate in the anti-Japanese movement in the 1940s and are arrested as communists when they go back to Taiwan. Genre: Drama / HistoryAwards: Nom. for Palme d'Or (Cannes).Runtime: 108minRating: PG13 for some coarse language.International Sales: ShochikuIN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)

Screened in 35mm as part of the ‘Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’ retrospective at the National Museum of Singapore.Coming after the one-two punch of A City of Sadness (1989) and The Puppetmaster (1993), Good Men, Good Women completes Hou
Hsiao-Hsien's 'historical' trilogy with potent emotional impact. Unfortunately, being overshadowed by the two
preceding films means that it remains severely underrated, which doesn't do
justice to how this work should be regarded.

Good Men, Good Women is
one of Hou's most complex and layered pictures, once again exploring past
trauma, but situating it in a modern psychological space marked by a present
amnesia of Taiwan's troubling history.
In this regard, the film expands cinema's engagement with how history is
perceived, and how its spectre continues to haunt, unknowingly or otherwise,
the people of today.

There are three intertwining
narratives, which may prove to be challenging to make sense of: Firstly, a
young woman, Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh), living in modern Taipei gets
anonymous phone calls, while receiving countless fax documents of her old diary. Secondly, Liang Ching of the first thread is
also an actress, preparing for the role of Chiang Bi-Yu in a biopic about the
anti-Japanese resistance called 'Good Men, Good Women’. Thirdly, shot in black-and-white, we see
Chiang Bi-Yu and her group of anti-Japanese comrades traveling to mainland
China to join the resistance more than fifty years ago. This is imagined by Liang Ching.

Hou keeps these three threads at
arm's length for the bulk of the film; sometimes the cutting between different
settings and time periods can feel jarring, without eliciting much emotions. As such, the director’s trivialization of
blatant consumerism, promiscuousness, and lack of idealism in today's youth, is
drawn into sharp, even shocking, contrast with the heroic sacrifices of the
post-war generation.

But in the final quarter of Good Men, Good Women, he switches gears
and the film becomes emotionally highly-charged as the weight of history pushes
us to reflect with a heavy heart how the mirroring characters Liang Ching and
Chiang Bi-Yu have suffered, and by extension, how Taiwan has come to be – a fragmented
and ignorant country.

This brings to the fore the
brilliant circularity of its meta-filmic engagement: prologue and epilogue can
be read as one-and-the-same: historical, imagined past, and re-enactment. And what a way to end the film off with a
goosebumps-inducing song sung as if it is a funereal battle cry for redemption and justice, in a valiant bid to exorcise the ghosts of trauma that have been embedded so deep in history. A masterpiece.